Not only is the TV Archive something that is useful on its own and is good as a research service, it's a building block for something much bigger, it's a building block for applications of the internet and applications of news video we actually can't anticipate today, we don't know what these innovations will end up doing for the whole internet, but we know they're gonna be good and we know that they're like a first step towards something better.
We at the Berkman Society do a lot of research into digital media and we've, because of the availability of data, have focused on the logs and other online sources of media and have gotten pretty far with that but it's pretty limiting recognizing that broadcast media is still very, very important and so we're excited to be able to get access to a fully digitized version of searchable TV clips. So it's a potential game changer for media researchers.
This actually moves video from being something that's completely passive to something that people can actually engage with and share and be a part of. So it will actually make peopleāit will help people engage with video content in a way that they never have before and it's never been possible before with TV only news.
It's also a great tool to find out what the news is not talking about. What doesn't make it to primetime, what doesn't make it to the cable news stations.
With the television archive project you can take information from political speech and cross-reference it with other information from political speech and you don't have to be a network news producer to do it, you can do it in your own home and do it comprehensively.